Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity

by Slavoj Žižek

The progress of today’s sciences destroys the basic presuppositions of our everyday notion of reality. There are four main attitudes one can adopt towards this breakthrough. The first one is simply to insist on radical naturalism, i.e. to heroically pursue the logic of the scientific ‘disenchantment of reality’ whatever the cost, even if the very fundamental coordinates of our horizon of meaningful experience are thereby shattered. (In brain sciences, Patricia and Paul Churchland most radically opt for this attitude.) The second is to make a desperate attempt to move beneath or beyond the scientific approach into some presumably more original and authentic reading of the world (religion or other kinds of spirituality are the main candidates here) – as, ultimately, Heidegger does. The third and most hopeless approach is to try to forge some kind of New Age ‘synthesis’ between scientific Truth and the premodern world of Meaning: the claim is that new scientific results themselves (quantum physics, say) compel us to abandon materialism and point towards some new (Gnostic or Eastern) spirituality. Here is a standard version of this idea: The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.2 This line of reasoning stands for ideology at its wo...

we are free to constantly re-invent our sexual identities, to change not only our job or our professional trajectory but even our innermost subjective features like our sexual orientation. However, the scope of these freedoms is strictly prescribed by the coordinates of the existing system, and also by the way consumerist freedom effectively functions: the possibility to choose and consume imperceptibly turns into a superego obligation to choose.

After so much ‘bad news’ – seeing so many hopes brutally crushed in the space of radical action, spread between the two extremes of Maduro in Venezuela and Tsipras in Greece – it is easy to succumb to the temptation to claim that such action never really had a chance, that it was doomed from the very beginning, that the hope of a real and effective change for the better was a mere illusion.

Take the prospect of automatization of production, which will – so people fear – radically diminish the need for workers and thus make unemployment explode. But why fear this prospect? Does it not open up the possibility of a new society in which we all have to work much less? In what kind of society do we live, where good news is automatically turned into bad news? Or, to take another example of bad/good news: is the basic lesson of the recent public disclosure of the so-called Paradise Papers not the simple fact that the ultra-rich live in their special zones where they are not bound by common laws?

But the assuagement brought by Macron’s triumphant victory is no less dangerous, since his victory did not really awaken us – its effect is quite the opposite: sighs of relief everywhere, the nightmare is over, thank God the danger was kept at bay, Europe and our democracy are saved, so now we can go back to our liberal-capitalist sleep again.